Collaboration is making a great CMS for councils even better

Irish councils have realised that they can do more with less by working together, and are raising the bar for their online digital experiences without blowing their budgets, writes Stella Power, Managing Director, Annertech.

LocalGov Drupal (LGD) is a partnership of councils that work together to design, develop and share Drupal code to help one another serve their citizens more efficiently. They do this by creating bespoke websites that are set up to give their users exactly what they are looking for – whether it is finding information, applying for a service or paying a fine.

LGD is a publicly owned open-source distribution that is free to use – a CMS built by councils, for councils. By combining learnings and developing solutions to common problems and feature requirements, the LGD ecosystem is constantly evolving to improve service outcomes.

The LGD project aligns with the Build to Share initiative, which forms part of the Irish Government’s IT strategy. The initiative’s goal is for the public sector to share code in order to save valuable resources like time and money. With LGD, the features added by one council are available for other councils to use.

LGD started in the UK, but it was brought to Ireland by Annertech, and first taken up by Tipperary County Council. There were features that were pertinent to the Irish market that had not yet been developed. These include obvious must-haves like Irish translations but also other features such as an integration with the Irish Service Catalogue and pulling in Weekly Planning Notices.

Giving back

In the spirit of giving back to the project, Tipperary County Council funded an LGD extension that imports the services that a council offers from the Irish Service Catalogue. It gives councils a good launching point for their content because not only does it list and import all the services, but it also creates a page for each of them and structures the content throughout the site.

The service pages are created in both English and Irish, and the pages just need to be edited or updated, adding to a quick website turnaround.

In addition to the Irish Service Catalogue feature, Tipperary County also funded the LocalGov Multilingual feature, which adds the Irish translations.

Similarly, Carlow County Council funded the build for the Weekly Planning Notices extension. It is a statutory requirement that all Irish councils are required to publish information about the planning applications granted and declined each week. This extension provides a way for Irish councils to upload and publish the notices. In addition, it allows them to be posted in Irish, boosting the crucial multilingual functionality of LGD sites.

Carlow County Council also funded councillor listings and council minutes/agendas extensions, which allow users to search for councillors, and minutes/agendas by municipal district or meeting year.

“We have had positive feedback from the people who use our website and the number of hits on our website has dramatically increased,” says Martina Loughnane from Carlow County Council.

“We were delighted to be able to give back the Weekly Planning Notices module to the LGD community and hope that the other local authorities who follow us into the fold will get good use out of it.”

And they have – both Laois County Council and Galway City Council, which recently launched their new LGD websites, used the features contributed by Tipperary and Carlow county councils.

Saving time and money

There are usually budgetary challenges in building a website from scratch or migrating from an existing website, and the public sector is under pressure to spend its budget wisely.

Because the code already exists the LGD project can see councils saving up to 80 per cent on their digital projects. And because LGD is an open-source CMS, there are no licence fees involved and councils are not locked into expensive contracts or proprietary software.

“We believe that local authorities should be working collaboratively instead of in parallel spending €100,000 to €250,000 on singular websites, potentially being out of date in a few months,” says Ruth Maher from Tipperary County Council.

By using a platform that other councils have already built to meet business objectives, councils save on time and the resource-intensive tasks of redesigning and rebuilding platforms.

“LGD freed up our time and budget to allow us to focus on added-value services as opposed to reinventing the website code-base from scratch,” adds Maher.

Tipperarycoco.ie was completed – from start to finish – in just four months! Carlow.ie was completed in 11 – not bad for a council website with lots of content that needed to be rewritten.

Levelling the playing field

Councils are varied – some have massive resources for their digital strategy while others have one or two content managers. LGD offers councils a way of levelling the playing field – councils who are new to the platform gain access to knowledge and practices from other councils that have already solved many common problems.
Each council who uses LGD is contributing towards the community. As the platform grows, their input helps to shape, build and improve the partnership for all councils involved. As other Irish councils encounter features that they’d like, they can pool their resources to have them developed.

And with 53 councils having joined the LGD community that means a lot of people are enjoying its benefits.

About Annertech

Annertech is Ireland’s leading open-source digital agency and has become the “go to“ experts for Drupal and LocalGov Drupal. Founded in 2008, Annertech works with many clients in both the private and public sectors.

In 2021 Annertech UK opened to service a growing number of clients and staff members in the UK. Annertech’s mission is to help companies to embrace open-source technology to deliver ambitious digital experiences for their customers.

Their work has won some of Ireland’s most prestigious digital awards, including multiple Spider Awards (including the coveted Grand Prix award), National Digital Awards and Digital Media Awards.

T: 01 524 0312
E: hello@annertech.com
W: www.annertech.com/localgov-drupal